A Missouri mother urged Warren County parents to take a closer look at the new eduational standards called “Common Core” now being implemented in public schools here and across the country.Stacy Shore, a mother of three school-age children from Camdenton, spoke on behalf of the Missouri Coalition Against Common Core at a Monday night meeting in Wright City sponsored by the Warren County Chapter of Concerned Women for America (CWA) and Warren County Patriots.Shore said she has been traveling across the state to teach people the kinds of questions to ask about Common Core.“As I’ve sat in on the hearings on education in Jefferson City, I’ve learned Common Core is big business,” Shore told an audience of about 30 people.“As moms and dads and grandparents, we’re fighting against billions of dollars in lobbying for this approach,” she said. “It’s very important for us to be our children’s advocates.”Shore said she got involved and began to question what was going on in the classroom when her son Beau was a third-grader learning math. She said she and her husband – a teacher – worked with Beau nightly on his math, teaching him to solve basic math problems as they themselves had learned.Despite Shore’s checking her son’s work, it came back graded “wrong.”Shore — who has two college degrees — said that when she approached her son’s teacher about the issues, and the teacher responded that it was not about right or wrong, but about the process. She said she encountered similar problems with what her daughter was being taught.“I knew that something was wrong; I just didn’t know at the time what ‘it’ was,” said Shore, who reported that her son was prohibited from studying a math book from home during a free-study period.“I later learned the school was piloting Common Core.”21st Century LearningLocal school officials have described the heart of the Common Core as the need to base education on what students need to know and be able to do in the 21st century.Most notably, leaders have said, the curriculum teaches students to think more critically and problem solve more creatively, introducing more complex classroom assignments that will better prepare them for college and the workplace.Shore argues with one of the basic tenets of the Common Core — setting one-size-fits-all state standards that she called a “national curriculum.”“Of course we want standards, but that’s not what this is about; it’s about control, but not at the local level,” she said.“We have standards, like grade-level expectations, along with the ACT and SAT, that already benchmark kids across the country, and we have the freedom to reach those expectations and standards in different ways.”Shore said that when the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) went out to each of the congressional districts earlier this year to promote Common Core, the meetings were tightly scripted and did not accommodate a question and answer session.She said that people at the time had little information to go on, and that as discussion within communities began to unfold, several communities issued invitations to DESE to come back and participate in open forums about concerns.DESE officials have not yet responded, she said, except through official written statements about not having resources for other meetings.State legislation that would have required DESE to return to congressional districts to take questions and explain more about Common Core passed the House, but died in the Senate because of filibuster threat.Usurping Local AuthorityShore’s core beef is the idea that powerful and influential people and organizations have collaborated to create a global education system that ultimately erases state and local sovereignty.Shore said that through grant programs such as Race to the Top, the federal government has packed incentives for states to implement the Common Core standards.Missouri State Commissioner of Education Chris Nicastro signed a letter of agreement in 2009 about federal funding incentives tied to standards, but the specific math and English standards were not introduced until 2010, she told the group.“The government said, ‘if you sign on, you can compete for Race to the Top money,” said Shore. “That’s how they got states to sign on.”Ironically, she noted, the city of Chicago, which received $43 million in Race to the Top two years ago, had the largest single closure of 50 schools last school year.With a chart of the nation’s three-branch system of accountability — executive, congressional and judicial — Shore overlaid a chart of the private interests that have their hands in the Common Core.Privatized ProductShore said her research revealed that Common Core standards are copyrighted by two private trade organizations, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).“They own the Common Core,” she said.On its Common Core website, CCSSO states it is “the key organization to lead comprehensive change in state education policies and practices, as chiefs often oversee a majority of the components of state human capital systems.“"I don’t like it when they refer to our children as ‘state human capital,’ ” she said.Shore stated that a key adviser for Common Core is Sir Michael Barber, who also is a chief adviser for the textbook and content publisher Pearson Publishing.Shore also was critical of the standards’ writers, whom she said had no experience in K-12 teaching or standards, but were chosen by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a major funding source for Common Core.Two noted experts invited to be on the Common Core Validation Committee — Stanford University mathematician and a NASA advisory board member Dr. James Milgram, and Dr. Sandra Stotskey, noted standards writer for the state of Massachusetts — have been highly and publicly critical of the standards and refused to validate them, Shore told the group.Dr. Milgram, she said, stated that the math standards did not match up with international expectations, citing that they were at least two years behind practices in high-achieving countries by the seventh grade and only require a partial understanding of what would be the content of a normal solid course in algebra I and geometry.Shore said that Jason Zimba, lead writer of the Common Core math standards, had spoken publicly in defining college readiness in mathematics as “readiness for a non-selective community college.”AssessmentShore said that with common standards at one end, the other bookend is assessment, not yet introduced but which will be performed by two other private organizations, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and PARCC Assessment, both funded through federal grant money.With the shifting of roles of federal government and private business in reforming the education system, Shore wonders about what she sees as the diminishing role of local bodies and parents.She said that only 15 percent of the standards can be changed locally; otherwise copyright laws dictate that content cannot be changed.“When the assessment piece is in place, we all know that schools are going to teach to those tests.”